Problems of today, Ideas for tomorrow

Collective Narcissism

I like Eric C’s post on Signs of Collective Narcissism, which seems to capture a useful concept that neatly describes some of today’s more alarming phenomena – nationalism, religious extremism, political extremism, populism, racism, sexism…

Of course this is the collective equivalent of narcissism of the invidual ego – the narcissism of a group. The job of all groups is to transcend this group ego and place it in support/ service of the whole, rather than serving itself at the expense of the whole.

We are, as humans, not that very old in the scheme of things, and we tend to think of ourselves as superior to every other living creature. Not unlike a college graduate who feels he knows more than older generations.
And we are still a herd animal, and tend to exhibit this at the expense of party givers, theater performances, park fountains, and group activities like craft shows or music festivals. I suspect that ‘mind meld’ phenomena came about before we developed sublteties of speech or gestures beyond point-and-grunt. On a group hunt everyone needed to know what wass going on at the front of the pack, and the only way to do that is silently, and precisely.

Easy enough to pick up any strong emotion, wordless or otherwise, in a group, and easy enough to adopt such behavior as your own. Its the reason Trump is so blindlngly good at crowd control; loud almost military music, and the ‘persona’ touch. “God Bless America, I love you all.” and he does everything but the Dinah Shore “mwahhhh” kiss. Not, i might add, unlike Revivalist Preachers.